


dreaming ahead

by littledust



Category: bare: A Pop Opera - Hartmere/Intrabartolo
Genre: Abortion, Catholic Guilt, Catholicism, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:40:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21839845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littledust/pseuds/littledust
Summary: In the months after graduation, Ivy grieves.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 24
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	dreaming ahead

**Author's Note:**

  * For [followsrabbit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/followsrabbit/gifts).



> A gift for you, dear Yuletide recipient! Thank you for all the prompts about Ivy, a character dear to my heart. ♥ 
> 
> This fic takes place at approximately the same time period as the musical, so late 90's/early 2000's. Any errors are due to me forgetting what life was like when we used AOL Instant Messenger to communicate. *G* The title is a quote from [Harper's beautiful final monologue in _Angels in America_.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og70dU7TP-Y)

Ivy knows that she's supposed to feel guilty about her decision. She knows, but she doesn't feel much at all these days. The last of her feelings dried up with the tears that she shed at Jason's funeral. There's a deep emptiness inside her, like the collapse of a dying star. Cold space where her heart is supposed to be. She remembers enough of last year's astronomy unit to know that a black hole will take down everything that gets too close.

They have to move out of their rooms in three days, so Ivy makes the appointment as fast as possible. She considers asking Nadia to drive her to Planned Parenthood. Nadia drove her to the first one, the one that confirmed Ivy is definitely pregnant, the one that told Ivy that she had _options_. What option does she have, really? 

In the end, Ivy can't bring herself to tell Nadia that she's destroying the last trace of Jason in the world. But it's that or destroy herself. 

Ivy approaches Matt instead. He has his own reasons to feel guilty; he's not in any position to question her. She tells him what she needs

"Yeah," is all he says. "Yeah, I'll take you. It's what--it's what he would have wanted me to do."

Ivy bites back the urge to say that none of them knew Jason well enough to know what he would have wanted, except Peter. She needs the favor from Matt more than she needs to... what? Set the record straight? Make herself feel like less of a fool by reminding herself that no one else had Jason figured out?

She blinks and she misses hours and hours of the day: the drive, the appointment, the supposed sin that she commits. It's probably bad that there are such long stretches of time that she can't remember, but this one feels like divine mercy. There are only flashes of the waiting room, and the doctor with her kind dark eyes and gentle hands. From what little she remembers, everything was clean and bright. Nothing like hell at all. The pain medicine works, and Ivy becomes a teenage girl again, no longer an unwed mother. The ex-pregnant ex-girlfriend of the dead boy.

She blinks again and she's back in Matt's car, dull pain in her abdomen, her forehead resting against the passenger side window.

"Ivy?" Matt asks. His eyes are on the road, always the responsible driver, but he sounds scared. "Do we--should I turn around?"

"No." Ivy looks down and there's a blanket draped over her, worn and blue. It smells a little like wet dog. "Where's this from?"

"I found it in the trunk. My family puts it down in the backseat when we take Goldie somewhere." Matt looks at her for a half-second and offers her a hesitant smile. "Goldie's my dog."

"Bet I can guess what color she is." Tone of voice, Ivy has discovered, is everything. She says it soft and sweet instead of loud and stinging, and Matt's smile gets wider instead of disappearing. Naming a yellow dog Goldie is typical Matt: endearing yet bland. It's why she's never been interested in Matt like that, but she likes him anyway.

Liked him, maybe. She ought to hate him for blurting out Jason's secret like that. Nadia is still furious. She'll be furious once she finds out what Ivy has done, and who she asked to help her. Ivy is too numb to care.

Matt drums his fingers on the steering wheel. "She's a good dog. Getting kind of old, but she still plays whenever I go home. I'll be able to see her more when I'm at college, since my family's just outside of Boston. Weird, right?"

"Weird," Ivy echoes. Her one word drops into the hole where her side of the conversation should be. She's never had a beloved pet, so she has nothing to contribute. This summer, she'll go to her mother's house and pretend the only reason that she's sad is because her boyfriend died. She already fed her mother the story at graduation. If she overheard any rumors about Ivy's supposed boyfriend having a secret boyfriend of his own, she was kind enough not to mention it.

After a couple of awkward minutes pass, and a bunch of trees blur by outside, Matt tries again. It's a long drive back to school, after all. "You're going to Vassar, right? I remember you got the letter after spring break."

She closes her eyes. The big envelope came before Ivy realized she was pregnant. She waved it around at rehearsal like it was some kind of sign, like proof that she was smart enough for college would make Jason fall in love with her. She remembers Nadia's cutting remark that of course Vassar had to accept her, since she was a legacy kid. She remembers Jason looking off into the distance--he was looking at Peter, of course. If she goes through all of her photo albums, she'll find a thousand pictures of Jason focused on someone just out of frame.

"I can't talk like things are normal, Matt." Ivy's voice wavers, even though all her emotions feel far away. "I'm not--you know what I just did. What you helped me do. I don't know if I can just go to college like things are fine."

This time, the silence goes on for so long that Ivy wonders if Matt thinks she's fallen asleep. She wishes that she could. All she sees when she closes her eyes is blackness, but it refuses to swallow her up. There's a role that she should be playing, the role of the penitent sinner, the bad girl who got her comeuppance at last, but instead there's nothing.

"I'm not going to college because I think it'll make things fine. It's just--it's just something _normal_." Matt's voice is choked. If Ivy opens her eyes, she knows she'll see tears on his cheeks.

She keeps her eyes closed. She doesn't have the heart to tell him there is no normal anymore.

*

Ivy's mother, the mother who always went on about Ivy's bright future and how there are more important things in life than boys, nods when Ivy tells her that she's deferred her acceptance to Vassar. Ivy can't tell whether her mother is being kind or whether she never expected anything more from her in the end. Either way, it buys Ivy time to sit in her childhood bedroom and stare at the wall. Does that count as grieving? She always thought it involved more crying.

Whatever stage of grief Ivy is in, the paralysis wears off after a few weeks. Her restlessness won't take her farther than the outskirts of town. Too bad, because there's not much to do in her tiny hometown. Shopkeepers don't like customers who never buy anything, much less customers young enough to be skipping school for some light shoplifting. Even a cup of coffee costs more than Ivy has now. A walk in the graveyard is pretty enough, but painful for obvious reasons.

Ivy ends up at the other free public attraction her hometown boasts: the local library. It's busier than she expects, even in the middle of the day. Unemployed people come in to search for jobs or for help updating their resumes. Retirees come in to do their crosswords. Storytime for toddlers is so rambunctious that Ivy thinks, for half a second, Glad I don't have a kid. She catches the flicker of humor and snuffs it like a candle.

The more Ivy goes to the library, the more she becomes aware of a burning curiosity building inside the black hole in her chest. She could blame the library for encouraging a learning environment. She could blame St. Cecilia's for its complete lack of sex education. She could blame her own stupid heart, and its need to understand why Jason broke it.

One morning, a computer opens up. Ivy looks around to be sure no one is looking and types "homosexual" into the search bar. Then she closes the window before the results can pop up, turns around, and walks home.

But she's back the next day. She has to know, like Eve in the garden. She has to know _why_.

Ivy writes down everything in the card catalogue that looks useful, since she usually gets in too late to claim a computer. There's a lot of frightening stuff, online and in books. People write that AIDS is God's judgment on gay men for their sinful lifestyle. People write that homosexuality is an unnatural perversion that leads to other perversions, like pedophilia and bestiality. People write things that make Ivy feel sick to her stomach, and they dress it up with quotations from whatever version of the Bible they like best.

The people writing all those things are also quick to say that abortion is a one-way ticket to hell. That she's a murderer. That she, like Pontius Pilate, chose to wash her hands, but she will never be clean.

Ivy spends a few days in bed. Her eyes swell from crying. Grief is nothing but going backwards, over and over, sucked in by gravity. 

On the third day, Ivy's mother says, exhausted, "I'm sorry about your boyfriend, but you need to do something with yourself. We didn't send you to a good private school for you to lie around the house all day."

She goes back to the library, but she abandons the Internet and the nonfiction texts. There was something else in the catalogue, a play she's never heard of. _Angels in America_ sounds better than the stuff she's been reading.

Ivy devours the play in two days, even though it makes her cry in her reading corner, even though she doesn't understand half of what the characters are saying, even though she's too scared to check it out under her name. She _knows_ Harper, the depressed young Mormon woman married to a closeted gay man. She knows the pain and the lying and the grief; but the play shows her the other parts of the story, too.

She steals the copy of _Angels in America_. She leaves twenty dollars tucked in between its former book neighbors, which makes her feel a little less guilty. But what's one more sin on top of the much larger sins that she's already committed?

Ivy will never understand what it was like to be Jason McConnell, golden boy with a secret so deep it drew all of him into it. He had a black hole of his own inside his chest, one that expanded with the cold hatreds of the world. Maybe love and understanding could have created an astronomical impossibility, a reversal of gravity itself. Maybe the darkness would have claimed him anyway. They'll never get to find out.

She rereads the play over and over again, like she's learning the part of Harper for a production. Every time she whispers the words to herself, her own black hole gets a little smaller. It's still there, still sucking in light, but the words are enough to satiate some of its hunger.

In the last few days of her mother's patience, Ivy dusts off her old email address. She writes to Nadia, away at college in New York City. What she has to say is too much for Instant Messenger. Nadia might not ever speak to her again, anyway. Better to pretend it's because Nadia didn't see the email than know that Nadia won't respond.

Ivy writes about the abortion, and grieving, and trying to understand Jason better. She quotes _Angels in America_ , because how can she not? She writes about how hard it's been to wake up every day. She writes about moving on to start somewhere new, and for the first time acknowledges to herself that that's been her plan all along. She wants a place she's never seen before. She wants a place where she can be anyone she wants to be.

Jason would understand that, if he were here.

Nadia doesn't write back, but Ivy lets that go. Instead of researching ghosts in the library, she's planning for what lies ahead.

*

The flight out to California is an American cliche that still feels like hope. Ivy cries the whole way, noticeably enough that the little old lady sitting next to her offers her several tissues. Ever since the black hole started closing, Ivy's emotions have had nowhere to go. They keep leaking out of her face, for lack of a better place to stay. Ivy's long past the stage where she's embarrassed by it.

"What takes you out to Los Angeles?" the old woman wants to know.

"I want to be an actress," Ivy says, because that's the easier answer. It's just as much a cliche as running out west, but she loves inhabiting someone else's skin for a few hours. She doesn't love much of anything these days. She'll take it.

The woman says, "That's nice," and goes back to reading her book. Ivy can tell from the lift of her eyebrows that she doesn't expect Ivy to become a big time movie star. That's fine. Ivy doesn't expect that of herself, either. The most she's letting herself expect is a place where she might want to get out of bed in the morning.

Ivy's parents were against the idea, her father more than her mother, but they refused to let Ivy run off without a place to stay. They dug up some old school connection of theirs, who was willing to let Ivy stay with her for a few weeks while she finds more permanent housing. Christian charity at its finest. Ivy figures that if she never brings up the fact that she's a gay-sympathetic harlot who had an abortion and used to take ecstasy, they'll get along just fine.

The plane touches down in blazing brilliant sunlight, a stark contrast to the chilly gray autumn that Ivy left behind. She hopes it's an omen of things to come. Ivy grabs her carry-on from the overhead compartment and slings her backpack over her shoulders. Just like that, she's ready to step into her new life.

"Good luck out there, dear," the old woman says cheerfully. Ivy smiles and nods, fidgeting with her need to get off the plane. She's almost there.

Teresa, her parents' church connection, is nothing like Ivy expected. Teresa wears flare-leg jeans that wouldn't look out of place on Ivy herself, and a simple white blouse. She wears her gray hair cropped short, which shows off her dangling earrings, and she grins when she sees Ivy approach.

"Welcome to California!" Teresa's voice carries even in the crowded airport, big and hearty. It reminds Ivy of Sister Chantelle. "Been a while since I've heard the name St. Cecilia's. I'm surprised your parents remembered me from school, but your mom always did have a way of connecting with people."

The steady stream of small talk flows over Ivy on the long walk from the airport terminal to where Teresa parked her car. Ivy feels dizzy from it all: the hot desert sun, the dry air, the sheer force of Teresa's personality. She finds out that Teresa helps manage a women's shelter, of all things, and she's no stranger to helping people get back on their feet. 

"Or find their feet in the first place," Teresa adds, with such a knowing look in her eyes that Ivy has to turn away. She's not ready to talk about any of her real reasons for coming out here yet, and Teresa has the grace not to ask.

"You want to come to the house right away, or did you have a first California experience in mind?" Teresa asks when they get to her car.

Ivy takes a deep breath. The collapsing star part of her, the part of her that's still dying and taking everything down with it, says that her request is small and stupid and she shouldn't make it. "I want to put my feet in the Pacific," she forces out, one big blur of words. "I've never done that before."

"Well, you picked a good place for it. The airport's real close to the water." Teresa smiles. "Shouldn't be a long drive. Although Los Angeles will teach you a new definition of 'long drive.' I'm not trying to scare you off, but lying about the traffic seems like a bad way to start."

Ivy smiles and nods. She does a lot of smiling and nodding throughout the brief drive to the beach. She must look like a wreck, her eyes red and her face blotchy from crying, bags under her eyes from exhaustion, clothes wrinkled from the six-hour flight. Maybe Teresa looks at Ivy and sees one of her clients. She must be good with them, because she hits exactly the right combination of friendly and warm, without asking too many personal questions.

"I'll grab us some food while you dip your feet," Teresa says when they arrive. "You like hot dogs?"

"Sure," Ivy says. She can hardly hear anything over the rush of the waves, matching the beat of her own heart. The water tumbles over itself, a perfect blue against the pale sand. She can't wait another minute.

Ivy sheds her socks and shoes just before the high tide line. She rolls up her jeans fast and sloppy, one of them already slipping as she runs for the water like a little kid. Cold water hits her feet and tugs at her ankles, and suddenly she's laughing, laughing so hard she's crying.

She made it to California. She's here.

Ivy doesn't know how long she stays, feet planted in the surf, still despite the endless back-and-forth of the waves around her. She wipes away the tears before they leave salt tracks on her cheeks. She rinses her hands in the ocean, lets her own salt commingle with the Pacific's. She wonders if it's possible to baptize yourself. If today, here, she's been born anew.

*

Months later, Ivy has a tan and two jobs. Waitressing pays the bills, and working at the shelter pays back Teresa. Teresa has never in her life asked anyone to repay her, as far as Ivy can tell, and that makes her work all the harder. Someone has to make sure Teresa sleeps for more than four hours a night.

Ivy goes to auditions but has yet to land anything. She doesn't mind as much as she thought she would.

After about a month of her new life in California, Ivy gets an email from Nadia. It doesn't touch on Ivy's abortion except in the most oblique language, and Ivy realizes that she's never going to be able to mention it again if she wants any kind of relationship with Nadia at all. Maybe someday, when they have a chance to reconcile what the Church says with what they've lived.

Nadia includes Peter's contact info, and mentions that he got into Berkeley off the waitlist. In case Ivy wants to get in touch.

Ivy responds to Nadia, but takes much longer about reaching out to Peter. Berkeley is a long drive away, but they're in the same state. Can she handle talking to someone who loved Jason as much as she did? No--someone who loved Jason for all he was, because Jason showed Peter things he never showed anyone else. Ivy was always a pale substitute for what Jason really wanted.

But she knew Peter outside of Jason, too. Peter, the sweet mama's boy with the voice of an angel. Ivy loved singing with him, loved how he never treated her like just another stupid party girl with a pretty face. There was a gentleness to Peter that had nothing to do with his sexuality and everything to do with his heart.

Ivy writes the email. While she's at it, she exchanges a handful of IMs with Matt, more of a hi-how-are-you than anything else. The women's shelter has exactly one computer, and Ivy uses it for actual work most of the time. (Teresa, for all her many talents, can barely turn it on without causing some kind of technological meltdown.)

Peter writes back, as she always knew he would. He wants to meet up just to talk, is that okay? Ivy writes back, giddy because he's willing to _see_ her, and says she'll make the six-hour trip if he'll take her to his favorite beach.

She spends the whole way up to Berkeley trying to breathe. Her memory of Teresa asking if this is a trip to see a _special_ boy keeps her going. When Ivy finished laughing, she said, "He's gay, Teresa." Out loud, like it was normal to have a gay friend. Hearing that, Teresa chuckled and replied, "Guess I don't have to worry, then."

Peter looks tired when he picks her up, but that's all--no drastic change in his appearance despite everything that's happened. "I just finished my last midterm. Sorry if I'm a little out of it," he says. 

"How are…" Ivy starts, and catches herself. "You know, I hate it when people ask me that."

Peter's mouth quirks upward in recognition. "Here, let me take you to that beach I promised you."

The Pacific Ocean is still as beautiful as Ivy's first impression of it. They walk side by side in comfortable silence, listening to the shush-shush-shush of waves on the shore. The center of Ivy's chest aches. The black hole is still there, but it doesn't swallow up the rest of her feelings anymore. It only hurts when her heart brushes up against its edges, reminded that the loss will always be there, no matter how much she heals.

"Why California?" Peter asks at last.

"Well. Chase the moon across America," Ivy says.

His eyes widen just a little, recognizing the quote from _Angels in America_. Surprise brightens into a smile that lights up his whole face, clearing away dozens of shadows. "That's--wow. I guess I was doing the same thing, kind of."

Ivy notices the Pride pins on his messenger back, caught in the light of his smile. "You seem happier here. I'm glad."

"And you're happy in Los Angeles?"

"Maybe. I think so." Ivy looks out at the waves and braces herself for impact. Never met a peaceful situation she couldn't ruin with her antics. "I--I didn't have the baby. I thought you should hear it from me."

They walk in silence for a little while longer. At last, Peter says, "I don't know if the gay ex-Catholic should be the one to take your confession." He waves a hand at the beach. "You picked a nice spot for the booth, though."

A laugh escapes Ivy even though there are tears in her eyes, hot and stinging. "You left the Church? Um, not that I blame you."

"Until they make Sister Chantelle the Pope."

"That sounds about right." Ivy wipes at her eyes. "You know, I haven't been to church in forever, but I don't know if I'm not Catholic anymore."

"Well. It sounds like you've had a lot on your mind."

Ivy catches Peter's hand in hers, hearing the catch in his voice. Peter looks at her, eyes wet, and she holds on as hard as she can. She doesn't know what to say, but she can borrow only so many words from the playwrights. "I'm glad we're here," she whispers, and she means on this beach, and in California, and still alive.

Peter's eyes close, and tears slip down his cheeks. "I miss him every day."

"I know. I know."

They embrace on the beach, hands fisted in each other's jackets, shoulders shaking as they cry. There's no forgiveness to be found here, but that's because neither of them did anything wrong in the first place. They loved, and they lost, and now together they grieve. The only way out is through.

When the tears subside, Ivy dries Peter's face and he dries hers, another kind of baptism. They talk a little more about their lives now. Peter is studying music and theater. Ivy tells him about her own string of failed auditions, and it doesn't hurt at all. 

As she talks, something shifts into place at last. It would be an easy metaphor, trading the black hole in her chest for stardom in Hollywood, but she's learned that life has to be more than one thing. Her life is a constellation, stars for joy and stars for sorrow, all connected by the intangible points of light that make up her soul.

"I think I'm going to be okay," she tells Peter. Her smile hurts, but it stays.


End file.
